Walter Zimmerman (26:42)
This is a story about what I think of as the second worst Christmas present I ever got. Now, I have to clear up that the first worst Christmas present is still a toss up between the ugly tie. A boss of mine gave me that. The only honest thing I could say is I've never seen anything like it. And then one of my teaching colleagues when I was teaching in college gave me what I thought was a luscious drop of about 2 ounces of the finest chocolate in the world wrapped in aluminum foil. It turned out to be a drop of owl vomit, which I was told that if I was really lucky, I could soak it in warm water and perhaps find a mouse's skull. I'm leaving top worst out there because I still think there might be something else waiting for me. But the second worst I'm pretty clear about it was 1956. I was nine years and three months old. Dwight Eisenhower, the bald guy was president. Norma Jean Baker was just about to change her name formally to Marilyn Monroe. And Rin Tin Tin was the big star on television. Now, the previous fall in Belleville, Illinois, my parents, who had been married for 10 years and had five children, had decided to get a divorce. My mother actually planned this long before my father even knew about it and told Us, me and my four younger siblings, that she was going to take one of us with her. I, of course, prayed that it would be me, because I was the oldest and I could dress myself. But as it turned out, she chose my sister. And one day, just shortly after my ninth birthday, my dad piled my three brothers in the back seat of the black Buick and me in the front because I was the oldest. And we drove east from Belleville, Illinois, where the family fell apart, to my Aunt Marie's house, which is just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We spent about six weeks during which it seemed as though the lights were never on. And then In January of 1956, my father piled my three brothers and me back into the black Buick and drove us not all that far from my Aunt Marie's house out into the country with corn fields and woods on either side. And then up a low hill to where there was a big house. And he left us there and drove away. So at nine years and three months old, in January of 1956, I found myself with my three brothers living at the United Presbyterian Children's Orphanage in Mars, Pennsylvania, where they principally make bricks. Now, I don't usually talk about this part of my life because I really feel like it's kind of. I'm going to be contagious to people. I don't want them to think that these things really happen, but they do, and there's a lot I don't actually know. I cannot explain to you the legalities of how it was that children who had living parents were put into an orphanage. I don't have an answer. The only way to get answers to these is to have a seance. Because everyone who knows is dead. All I can tell you is I was nine years old and three months. I had three younger brothers. People say, oh, well, it's really better then that you were all there together. It's like saying, well, isn't it nice that you had adjoining cabins in the Titanic or that you had the plague at the same time? It just doesn't really pay off. Two of my brothers were so young, they were kept in a nursery. A different part of the building that I never saw. My brother George, who was in first grade, and I were put into the junior boys department. That was first grade through sixth grade. I didn't see the whole building because we weren't there as tourists. We were there as inmates. I was only on the third floor, and then I was downstairs in the big dining room where they had all the round tables where we sat and my brothers And I were not put together. My brother George slept in one end of the third floor. I slept in the other. It was really totally confusing. My father, in fact, before we left Illinois, had taken me aside in one of the seven conversations we had during the 40 years that I knew them. He took me aside and he said, you boys will never live in an orphanage. And then, months later, I came across a bronze plaque hidden on a wall someplace that said, united Presbyterian Children's Orphanage. And if I hadn't had a chore to do, I would still be standing there today in strict, utter unbelief. I had no idea where I was, and I had to learn what to do. So the bell rang in the morning. We jumped up out of bed. We ran into the bathroom where there were five sinks for 20 boys. We brushed our teeth with salt or baking soda because that's what the orphanage provided. Then we ran back and made our beds, and we got dressed as quickly as we could. Then we ran to get in line to go downstairs to have breakfast. Then we ran from the breakfast room to the cloak room, where, if it was school season, we would gather our books. And if it was summer, we would gather our gardening tools. And then we would run to stand in line. And then, if it was school season, we would run to school, which was the only safe place there was. And then I would drag myself back. We would take our lunch to school, a little bag of a sandwich, maybe a piece of fruit, drag myself back when school was over, and we would go back up to the third floor and have Bible study. And then we would come down and have dinner. Then we would go, all of us, all of the grades from first grade up through high school down to the gymnasium, sit at big, long tables and do our homework. Then we'd go back up to the third floor. We would read our Bibles again and then go to sleep, many of us crying as time went past. On Sundays, it was a slightly different schedule. We would get up earlier than ever and go to church. We had Sunday school. We had church service. We had lunch. We had another church service. And then twice during the week, I think it was Tuesdays and Thursdays, the boys and girls would gather. The younger kids would sit in the big, wide staircase. It was in the entrance hall. Junior girls on one side, junior boys on the other. Older boys and girls sitting in folding chairs. On the ground floor, there was a podium, and one of the older boys would stand there, or girls stand there and mispronounce almost every word in the King James Version. Of the Bible. I remember during one of the silent periods during one of these church services, we were probably supposed to be praying. The little boy sitting next to me pointed out that he had an itchy place on his arm. And I leaned over and being the helpful kind of guy, I said, I looked at him and said, you know, I think that's leprosy. I didn't expect him to scream. And then he started to cry. And I came so close that night to getting a beautiful from Miss Thrasher. Miss Thrasher was the house mother. Miss Thrasher was the one who was in charge of boys first grade through sixth grade. She was sort of an aircraft carrier of a woman. She was rather large, she was rather regal. I think someone had told her she looked like Mae west when she was much, much younger. She was really rather arrogant. She wore her hair, it had been blonde, I think it had turned gray, was long and she braided it and she put it up in a crown on top of her head, sort of like if Medusa had been Ukrainian. But what I really remember most about her were her shoes. She wore these little high heel, lace up, black open toe pumps. But she was utterly silent. And she would appear out of nowhere to find you doing the thing you didn't know was wrong and get pinched or slapped or at night she'd come to the bed, you pull down your pajama pants, you lie there on your stomach and she beats you with a razor strap. I don't even know where house mothers get razor straps. Is there a razor strap store for people who work in orphanages? It was a mystery to me. But again, there wasn't a lot I understood. I just had to adapt. One day, this was a turning point for me. She strode into the room in all her majesty and some of the boys were having a little race with their plastic cars. And she indifferently trod on a little airplane that was racing across the floor to see which was faster. And she turned it into smithereens. It was really kind of funny in a way, but it was also tragic because this was the only toy this little kid had. And of course she blamed him. And he got the strap last night. I have to tell you that it doesn't really matter where in the room the strap falls. You still feel it yourself. I lived in a dream world. I totally did. It was just too bizarre for me. I couldn't understand what was going on. I couldn't comprehend it. I couldn't absorb the emotional impact of what had happened to me. So I just went off and collected moths and kept them in my underwear drawer, hoping that they would lay eggs and hatch and eat my underpants. And then a flock of Mexican tiger moths would emerge with the beautiful black and pink wings and just fly out the window. During homework assignments, I would always finish first and we were allowed to look at the National Geographics that sat on the table nearby. I would go and pour through these for the most beautiful animals I could find. Eagles and panthers. I remember one picture I saw. A full page color photograph of an impala leaping through some grass in Africa. And slowly and steadily, at my life's risk, I tore that photograph out of the magazine while the house mothers were sleuthing around nearby. And I sneaked it into my textbook and I sneaked it upstairs to my cubbyhole on the third floor. And I sneaked with the scissors that I had stolen from my 5th grade classroom and I cut out very, very carefully all of the background paper from that impala, believing somehow that if I did it right, that impala would come to life and leap out of the third floor window of the junior boys and across across that roof and down into the woods across the way and live with the deer free. Of course, that never happened. That ended up a ball of paper on the floor of my cubby hole along with the eagle and the panther. The one thing I did do. But I'm still rather amazed that I had the nerve to take care of this, to do this myself. I would wake up in the night. Everyone was asleep. I would get up, my heart was beating so loudly I was surprised that the windows weren't rattling. I would steal out into the hallway past Ms. Thrasher's room, through the big push door to the communal bathroom where we brushed our teeth with. I would turn the lights on, I would take off my hand me down pajamas because I wanted nothing to do with the orphanage. I would take two towels down off the wall and I would start to dance. I would dance and those towels became wings. They became fins of Siamese fighting fish. They became the manes of wild horses. They were magical to me. And I just danced and spread and twirled until I was exhausted. And then I put the towels back, put my pajamas on and went back to bed. That was pretty much my life on a private level. But of course, you know, I mean, we were still isolated as we were. We did live in the real world. Time did go past. We did watch television. We knew that holidays happened. My 10th birthday came. I got a birthday card from my grandfather. Halloween came. We Got some candy corn. Thanksgiving came. We got a little more gravy than usual. And then Christmas began to happen. Now, Christmas, of course, is the big one. Even then, Christmas was the big one. And Christmas is a hard one because it's about a family, for God's sake. And here we all were, outcasts. No one wanted us. I didn't even know why they locked the doors and didn't let us just run away at night. They wouldn't have to feed us. So it was like getting the outside of a holiday. The wreaths went up a huge tree in the front hall with gorgeously decorated packages, we found out later were empty boxes that were used as props year after year after year, so that the visitors would come and think that there was much more festivity than actually was in place. Now, I had my grandfather's address from that birthday card I had gotten for my 10th birthday. So I sent him, daringly, a request for a Christmas present I had seen on television and on the back of a comic book, an ad for a remote control Thunderbird automobile. A little toy about this big. I was thrilled with it. Thunderbirds were so cool and remote control. Wow. It would be so cool to play with it. And then I could hide behind one of the beds. And when Ms. Thrasher came through the door, I could send my Thunderbird on a suicide mission and trip that woman so her fat ass fell right on the floor. I didn't care how many beatings I would get. I would be the hero of the Junior boys. I would be a legend in my own time. So I sent the letter and promptly forgot about it because I was a boy living in an orphanage. What hope that I have. And so, as time happens, Christmas came. We went to church. We had a bigger meal than usual. All the presents in the downstairs we knew were empty boxes. So the junior boys went back upstairs to our third floor enclave. And there were socks and underwear for everyone. And then there was a few boxes. And there was a box for me, a really big box. Surely they wouldn't give me this much underwear. And I opened the wrapping paper, and it was the Thunderbird convertible. The remote control Thunderbird convertible in my hands in the box. And there on the COVID was a little boy with a handheld control with a little steering wheel that was separate and you could make the car go left and right at your command. And I just. I was astonished. So I ripped the box open. And there lying in the paper is the gleaming, brand new turquoise and white Thunderbird convertible. And there at the other end Is this clever battery included power source with the clicks for left and right and you can turn it with your little turn. But in between, wrapped up in this brown paper, were these cables, these black electrical cables that were hooked up to the rear end of the remote control Thunderbird and then the other end, about 3ft later was hooked up to the manual control. I said, this is no more remote control than a glove. There goes my plan for being the hero of the Junior boys. How on earth am I going to deal with this? I was truly disgusted. And the worst thing was that around that connecting cable was a very thin skin of a sort of a purple, gray, blue, brown plastic held in place by sort of like the ancestor of zip ties. And I could tell as soon as I saw it that someone meant this is invisible. You don't see this. I was furious. I was livid. I couldn't believe it, but I was desperate. And besides, it was Christmas and I was 10 years old and it was a toy. So I got it out and I tried to make it go and it sort of sluggishly went forward and then I tried to make it go backwards and it got caught in its own cabling. And then I tried to make it turn. It was like sluggish to the left and sluggish to the right. And I was very persistent because I thought, well, maybe I can treat the car like a trapdoor spider. Maybe it can like jump out and come back and make her fall down, maybe jump out and come back. But by the time I played with it for about 20 minutes, it had inextricably tangled itself in the legs of a little chair. And I had to pick the chair up to get the car out. And so I looked around the room and I saw the boy I hated the most and I gave the car to him and I went back to taking care of moths in my underwear drawer and dancing in the dark. Now I stayed in the orphanage for about eight more months. My brothers came out a year after that, and then for another year there was horrible abuse at home. And then a year later they were sent back again. We rarely lived in the same house ever again. That part is something I almost never, ever talk about. But I still think about that God damn car. I still think about that God damned length of invisibility plastic. I mean, how could someone, an adult who wore a tie to work and probably got health insurance, have a job to make things to fool 10 year old boys? How low is that? And you know, I still have a little bit of that anger when I see those commercials on television for the unpronounceable new drug, for a new syndrome we didn't even know we had. And we're watching people jump into mirror clear lakes with their arms full of Labrador retriever puppies when their body should be on fire and their heads should be bursting from all the side effects that the disembodied disclaimer voice is telling you about, and see if Ms. Blixatrix is right for you. So Christmas is not really my best time of year. It's a little difficult. But I have to tell you, I mean, in spite of this background, I can tell you my life has been unimaginably different from what that background would have led me to believe. I mean, I have a relationship with the same man for 30 years. I have a Master of Fine Arts, which is why I was able to teach glassblowing in Philadelphia and write, this minute in the Whitney Museum in Manhattan on the third floor is a piece of my artwork. How weirdly improbable is that? I mean, who knew? Ah, ah, ah. But I have to tell you, this is the other side of the story. Institutionalization leaves a mark. All kids who go through this kind of thing know that it's their fault. And I have to tell you, I'm simply being honest, that as I walk through the world, I feel as though I'm really passing for normal. I really feel as though I have to look like I belong because I know that there's something. It's only the outside. It's only the outside. Inside, there's no connection. So what I'm really thrilled about, about being able to be here tonight is to share this story about what really did happen, hoping that most of you won't have any idea of what I'm talking about, will think it's really just sort of fascinating. But somebody. Somebody might relate, somebody might understand on one level or another. And I just want to let you know you're not alone. I'm not alone. We're not alone. Have the sweetest possible holiday. Thank you.
